It's 10 pm. Do you know where you and your loved ones are?
Here is a collection of experiences from those who live / have lived with an obsessive MMOG gamer and from those who have lived the experience of obsessive MMOG gaming.

Monday, January 23, 2006

2 Comments:

Heh, so that's what that's called. I'd always just referred to it as neglecting my life due to my addiction. Fortunately I no longer play any MMORPGs, but the addiction is still there...

I thought that this blurb from the end of the article was interesting:

In 2005, China announced new laws intended to combat online game addiction by requiring game companies to impose increasingly severe in-game penalties on players that play longer than three hours at a time.

I'm trying to think about what that would have been like for me at the height of my EQ addiction -- for instance, if after three hours of play an experience penalty was invoked, or player stats were decreased -- I'm honestly not sure what my reaction to that would have been. It's easy for me to say that I'd probably stop playing after three hours and come back later on when the penalties were lifted, but then again, I was so uncontrollably addicted that I might very well have carried on playing and just complained about it to anyone who would listen.

Yep, I also didn't know that there was a term for it until I read someone else's post.

As for the last paragraph, I think my reaction (when I was playing "compellingly") would have been to try to stage an online sit-in to protest :) Is this approach a solution? I'm not convinced at this point - gamers aren't stupid and most likely will find a way to circumvent or defeat it.